Two Ways Frequent Trading Reverses Profitability

day trading kills your equity

Risk is an asset class. Keep in in your portfolio when it pays you to do so. That means overnight and over the weekend.

When you day trade, you are churning your own account. This is the first order of business to kill off.

In a recent interview with Chats With Traders, my friend Aaron Brown said that traders generally leave way too much money on the table.

The real money is holding the best risks. You can define where you are going “risk off” by placing protective stop orders on your winners and Stop Loss orders on recent fills.

Staying in good trades longer frees up time so that you can do more research, read, or go have fun doing whatever gives you pleasure. Rule #2: hold winner longer, make more money, and free up time to sharpen your saw.

Exercise: Go to your best trades and enter them in a spreadsheet. Column A is your Entry. Column B is your exit. Column C is where it is now. Column D is what the worst price was between the prices in column B and C.

Look at the percentage of those trades where the price is Column C today is higher than Column B but also where the price is column D never went below Column A. This helps you understand the opportunity cost of short-term trading and how it works against you.